Cryptic Studios Open Sources Animation Tools

GameDev.net reports that Cryptic Studios (makers of the Massive title City of Heroes) has released a powerful animation tool under the GPL. Called CrypticAR, for Cryptic Animation Rig, the software will allow animators to bring 3d models to life via a toolkit of scripts and rigs. "'Our goal is to foster a community of animators by providing them the power to generate animations without having to worry about supporting a toolset. Since we were already developing the rig for our core technology team, we decided to release it to the public under the GNU GPL,' said Shayne Herrera, Art Development Director for Cryptic Studios. 'We feel that the development and gaming communities will benefit greatly from a professional tool like the Cryptic AR.'"

Comments

Re:Requires 3DS Max

[LetterRip]

Hi,

"If anyone from the Blender team reads this, how realistic would it be to incorporate this stuff into Blender? Or is the rigging functionality in Blender pretty much the same as this already?"

It is a rig, Ie it is a setup of bones, constraints, and drivers - so almost certainly something similar could be set up in Blender. I don't think it is even possible to 'copyright' a rig (it is pretty much purely functional it can't really be claimed to have expressive elements). They probably just don't understand copyright law and what its limits are.

LetterRip

Re:Is it just me?

[Darth]

City of Foozles is also extremely CPU bound,
in my experience, that is not the case. I have found memory to be more important than cpu.

and from experiences in the CoV closed beta I strongly believe that their art team has carte blanche to implement stuff without optimization or consulting with the coding teams.

well, it was a beta.

It took them close to a year to clean up the mess that was Arachnos laboratory maps-- in every one, there was a 'sour spot' that would cause virtually any machine to hang for ten to thirty seconds, presumably as a combination of poorly optimized textures, LoD nightmares (much of those maps is semi-transparent, so occlusion culling has a markedly reduced effect than it does on other indoor maps)

I have never experienced any of these "sour spot" issues. I've been playing COV since it was released and COH since a couple of weeks after it was released.

I did have chugging issues in COV in Mercy Isle, but i upgraded my RAM to 2gigs and it's very smooth now. My wife found COV unplayable because of lag. I upgraded her to 2 gigs of ram, and it's smooth for her almost everywhere in COV and everywhere in COH. The only advantage i have over her is load times into zones (my processor is much beefier than hers).

and the geometry holes that are still there to this day.

yeah, they've had some problems in the past with holes in the geometry that players and mobs could fall through. Most of them have been closed, but there are some still around. Most of the time now, it's really just a problem because bad guys will jump out of the map during a kill all mission and you have to ask a gm to bring them back for you. It would be nice if all of the leaks would be fixed though.

New content like the Universities are particularly awful-- when I enter one on my machine, the poor thing chugs for a minute while the shaders visibly load in texture by texture, and repeat the process when I turn to survey the scene.

I have run all over the universities and done the inventions tutorial. I have had no issues like you describe. Maybe it is your video drivers? I used to have problems when I had an ATI card (3 years ago, when i started playing) because of a bug in the drivers. It caused lots of messed up graphical glitches that made the game unplayable in some places. I replaced that card with an NVidia card and have had no problems since.

Before the universities became active, there was a bug that would allow you to fly under the geometry in one of the city zones where there was one; CoX simulates indoor chambers in world zones by placing them under the accessible map, so by going under the geometry you could see the inside of a store, with NPCs standing around and PCs flitting about willy-nilly.

that was a fun bug. My favourite effect of the indoor areas being located outside the accessible map was how the tsoo sorcerers used to teleport away from fights and into stores. That was funny as long as you werent the guy jacking with his enhancements in the shop when the sorcerer showed up.